4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
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Bin Laden's right-hand man
Wherever Osama Bin Laden is hiding in Afghanistan, his closest associate, the leader of Egypt's Jihad group, Ayman El-Zawaheri, is probably with him. Khaled Dawoud takes a closer at the man dubbed by the US as its "second most wanted" suspect
After declaring Osama Bin Laden the prime suspect and "most wanted man" in the horrific 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, US investigators last week declared the leader of Egypt's Islamist Jihad group, Ayman El-Zawaheri, the "second most wanted man."
"In Afghanistan, we gained organisational, political and military skills that we could never have obtained in any other country. This [Afghanistan] is an open front for jihad which Muslim youth come to from throughout the Muslim world ... These youth who came for jihad managed to defeat a superpower and are no longer afraid of confronting any power that calls itself 'super.'
"The Afghanistan period was a rich one, from which we benefited greatly in Egypt. In response to our newfound strength, the regime had no option but to suppress Islamist forces who refuse to become agents for America and Israel, and demand a return to Islam and the nation's Muslim identity."
Islamic Jihad leader Ayman El-Zawaheri (above), in an unaired interview with Al-Jazeera correspondent Jamal Ismail
El-Zawaheri and Bin Laden, presumed to be ensconced in one of their hideouts deep within a cave in one of Afghanistan's mountains, had already been on the US "wanted" list for over three years. US authorities hold the pair responsible for several anti-US attacks, including the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack against the USS Cole aircraft carrier in Yemen a year ago.
Only two days before the bombing of the US embassies in Africa, the Jihad group issued a statement warning of a "strong response" to reported US involvement in arresting and handing over to Egypt five leading Jihad militants who were on the lam in Albania. When the bombings took place, there was little doubt that the two events were linked.
El-Zawaheri also tops Egypt's most wanted list, and has been sentenced to death in absentia three times for his alleged involvement in masterminding and plotting several major anti- government attacks and the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan in 1995.
Little is known about the 50-year-old leader of Egypt's most violent militant Islamist group. Unlike the country's largest organisation of militant Islamists, the Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, which has frequently communicated with the media through non-member spokesmen, the Jihad has always been an extremely secretive military organisation whose primary goal is to topple the Egyptian government.
According to experts on Islamist groups, Jihad militants were never involved in the minor attacks against policemen -- the modus operandi of the Al-Gama'a in Egypt's south between 1992 and 1997. Jihad never perpetrated attacks against foreign tourists, although in its statements, the group said it "understood and appreciated" the logic behind such attacks.
Jihad set its sights on bigger targets such as high-ranking security officials and government ministers. It also believes in the necessity of infiltrating the country's most important establishment and the backbone of the regime, the army.
But after Bin Laden and El-Zawaheri announced their alliance and the establishment of the International Islamic Front for Fighting Against Jews and Crusaders (comprising five other militant Islamist groups) in February 1998, Jihad altered its course. Leaders of the group now say that they only target US and Israeli interests, claiming that US support for Arab regimes is the main reason the governments continue to survive.
Experts on militant Islamist groups say that El-Zawaheri has been one of the political trend's most elusive leaders. Born in Giza, Cairo in 1951, Ayman Mohamed Rabie El-Zawaheri does not fit the classic profile of militant Islamists as presented by sociologists in their studies on the rise of political Islam in Egypt and the Arab world. These works suggest that members are typically of lower middle class origin and from rural areas. Accordingly, these "angry young men," having grown frustrated by poverty, unemployment and a lack of political freedom, struck back against the government with the aim of implementing an Islamic state.
Instead El-Zawaheri is the scion of a relatively wealthy family. His father, Mohamed Rabie El-Zawaheri, was a science professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and his grandfather, Mohamed Hassan El-Zawaheri, was the Grand Imam of Al- Azhar, the prestigious school of Islamic teaching. His mother, meanwhile, belonged to the Azzam family, a prominent Egyptian clan.
After finishing his high-school education in 1968, El- Zawaheri joined the Faculty of Medicine, graduating in 1974. Because he went on to become a skillful surgeon, it appears that his political activities at university as a young militant did not divert him from his studies. El-Zawaheri continued his medical studies and earned an MA in 1978. He said he wanted to study for a PhD, but he put this plan on hold for his political activities.
The years from the mid-1970s until the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat in 1981 by members of the Jihad group -- not the one now headed by El-Zawaheri -- comprise the golden years for Islamist political activism at Egyptian universities. During that period, there was a bitter struggle between leftists and Islamist students who were backed by the state. It was in this atmosphere of political tension, which intensified following El-Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977 and his singing of the Camp David agreements two years later, that El-Zawaheri developed his political views and strategy to transform Egypt into an Islamic state.
When the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, El-Zawaheri was among the first to respond to calls for solidarity with the occupied Muslim nation and resistance to communist rule. He stayed in Afghanistan for one year among a delegation of Egyptian doctors who offered medical aid to the Mujahidin, or fighters, in the war against the former Soviet Union. Shortly after El-Zawaheri returned to Egypt, El-Sadat was assassinated by a group of armed militants led by a captain in Egypt's army, Khaled El-Islambouli.
Like other leaders of Egyptian Islamist groups, El-Zawaheri has a great deal of respect and admiration for El-Islambouli and his three colleagues. "The heroic act carried out by Khaled El- Islambouli and his brothers triggered our struggle and call for jihad in Egypt against the regime and the Jews," he has said.
El-Zawaheri himself was among thousands of militants arrested following El-Sadat's assassination. Although prosecutors called for El-Zawaheri to be executed for his alleged involvement in armed activity aimed at overthrowing the state, he was sentenced to only three years imprisonment. His prison experience, he said, deepened his opposition to the regime. He alleged that he was badly tortured and mistreated by security personnel. Yet, unlike dozens of militants who have been in prison since 1981 despite serving their sentences -- allegedly because they still pose a threat to national security -- El-Zawaheri was released on time. After spending a few months in Egypt, he fled the country in late 1984.
El-Zawaheri ended up in Afghanistan again, resuming the fight among the Mujahidin, backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. According to El-Zawaheri, the Afghanistan experience was a turning point in the history of political Islamist groups in Egypt and the Arab world. "Afghanistan gave an important push to the cause of jihad and Islamist action in the Arab world," El-Zawaheri said in a rare interview that he granted from Afghanistan in 1999. The interview was conducted by a former correspondent for the Qatari Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, Jamal Ismail, and was never aired or published. Ismail, who later published the text of the interview in a book issued last year, claimed that the popular, pan-Arab television channel did not run the interview because of the extremely harsh language El-Zawaheri used in criticising the Egyptian government.
"In Afghanistan, we gained organisational, political and military skills that we could never have obtained in any other country. This [Afghanistan] is an open front for jihad which Muslim youth come to from throughout the Muslim world," he added. "These youth who came for jihad managed to defeat a superpower [the former Soviet Union], and are no longer afraid of confronting any power that calls itself 'super.' The Afghanistan period was a rich one from which we benefited greatly in Egypt. In response to our newfound strength, the regime had no option but to suppress Islamist forces who refuse to become agents for America and Israel, and demand a return to Islam and the nation's Muslim identity."
In 1993, El-Zawaheri was forced to flee Peshawer, Pakistan -- at the time a base for many Arabs fighting in Afghanistan -- after former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, under tremendous pressure, cracked down on Arab Afghans who were said to be masterminding anti-government attacks in their countries of origin. Between 1993 and 1996, El-Zawaheri's whereabouts remained a mystery. During those three years, he was reported to have been sighted in Switzerland, Sudan and Yemen. He has not disclosed where he was during that period. But after Bin Laden was pushed out of Sudan in 1996, and he returned to Afghanistan as a "guest" protected by the ruling Taliban regime, reports emerged about a burgeoning alliance between the two men. These reports were confirmed when the two appeared at a joint news conference in early 1998 to declare the formation of the International Islamic Front.
In his interview with Al-Jazeera, El-Zawaheri said that his decision to join forces with Bin Laden and to concentrate his struggle against American and Israeli targets was merely the culmination of his long experience waging jihad. Explaining the development of his beliefs, El-Zawaheri said, "Gradually, we developed the belief that this nation was being targeted because it is a Muslim nation. There is a new crusaders' war that aims to attack this nation and usurp its resources and land. This war aims at suppressing our political will and burying our religion. As a result, Muslim youth reached the conclusion that their main enemy is a Jewish-Christian alliance, the leaders of which live in the White House and Israel. These enemies are the ones who pressure Arab regimes to suppress the Islamic movement."
El-Zawaheri said that US attacks against Iraq and support for Israel in its suppression of the Palestinian people could only be deterred by recourse to violence. "The response to American attacks against Iraq cannot be through slogans and demonstrations. We have to respond to the United States and Israel in the same way they deal with Arabs and Muslims. America killed civilians and children in Iraq. Israel killed civilians in Qana [in south Lebanon], Sabra and Shatila, Deir Yassin and the Bahr El-Baqar school [in Egypt]. America is also starving the Iraqi people, it steals our money and occupies our land. Thus, there is no other way to respond to them. These people [the Americans] have no morals. They used nuclear weaons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- even after Japan declared its surrender. These people do not understand anything except the language of force."
Asked if he feared for his life, especially after the United States targeted Arab Afghan training camps in Afghanistan in 1998, El-Zawaheri mocked the very concept of fear. "We expect an attack at any time. We expect to be killed at any time. Personally, I think we have lived longer than we should have. We want to die for the sake of God. The reason the United States attacked us in 1998 was not because of the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was because the International Islamic Front explicitly told Muslims: 'Kill Americans as they kill you. We call upon all Islamist groups practicing jihad to unite behind this goal.' Defeating America is not a difficult task. It was defeated before in Vietnam and ousted from Lebanon and Somalia. If we stand united against America, it might end as the Soviet Union did. Everything depends on our determination to resist."
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